Born 1794,
Quebec, Canada
Died September 27, 1854,
Oregon City, Oregon
Peter Skene Ogden became an explorer as a result of his work as a fur trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Known for his ruthless and brutal dealings with Native Americans, he could speak several native languages. Since he could also speak French fluently, he was known among the trappers as “Monsieur Pete.” He was married to two Native American women and had children with both of them. In 1853, the year before his death, he anonymously published a book about his experiences called Traits of American-Indian Life and Character.
Ogden was born in Quebec City in Canada. Ogden’s parents were natives of the United States who went to Canada during the American Revolution because they supported Britain. When Peter was four years old, his family moved to Montreal, where his father was appointed a judge. Montreal at that time was the center of the fur trade in North America. There was bitter competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company, controlled from London, and the Montreal-based North West Company. Unlike his brothers, who followed their father into the legal profession, Peter entered the fur trade as an employee of the North West Company in 1809; he was stationed at Ile-a-la-Crosse.
Ogden quickly gained a reputation for being one of the most violent and ruthless of all the traders engaged in a notoriously cutthroat business. He was accused of a number of crimes that culminated in March 1818 when he was indicted for the murder of a Native American who traded with Ogden’s rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company. In order to put him out of the reach of the law, the North West Company sent Ogden to its most remote posts in what is now the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Unfortunately for Ogden, the two rival fur companies decided that their competition was only helping their American rivals and in 1821 they decided to unite under the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Ogden was so hated by the directors of the Hudson’s Bay Company that one of the provisions of the agreement was that he was not to be employed by the joint company. Having no means of support, Ogden traveled to Montreal and then to London to try to convince the company to rehire him.
At about this time, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent out George Simpson to take charge of its posts in territory that is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia. This area had been claimed by both Great Britain and the United States; the dispute was not to be settled until 1846. Directly south was Spanish territory that was just then coming under the control of the new Republic of Mexico. Simpson felt that if Britain was to prevail it would have to make use of its most ruthless men, including Ogden; under Simpson’s influence, the company agreed to reemploy Ogden. In 1824 Ogden was instructed to travel to the Snake River country in present-day Idaho.
On December 20, 1824, Ogden left Flathead House at Flathead Lake in northern Montana with a party of 58 people. Near present-day Missoula, Montana, he met the famous American trapper Jedediah Smith (see entry); they joined forces for the next two months, trapping as far south as the Bear River in southeastern Idaho. When they parted Ogden journeyed farther south, where one of his men sighted the Great Salt Lake from a mountain peak, probably the second time it had been seen by Westerners. Ogden’s party camped at Mountain Green east of the Great Salt Lake. In May 1825 a larger party of American trappers arrived at the camp. They attacked Ogden and took all the furs he had collected and persuaded most of his trappers to leave with them. After this misfortune Ogden returned to the British post near Walla Walla in Washington the following November.
During the winter and spring of 1825-26 Ogden trapped in the Snake River country as far east as the Portneuf River in eastern Idaho near present-day Pocatello. He then returned to Walla Walla. In 1826, after only two months of rest, he returned to eastern Oregon to the Malheur River. He then traveled to the Klamath River in northern California, where he saw and named Mount Shasta, the tallest peak in the Cascade Range, before turning back north. In the region around Goose Lake on the California-Oregon border, the only thing that was available to drink was liquid mud. Ogden wrote, “This is certainly a most horrid life.”
Sometime during 1827, while he was in the territory that is now Utah, Ogden discovered the river that was later named for him. In 1828-29 he went south into Nevada, becoming the first Westerner to see the Humboldt River, which rises on the western slope of the Rockies and disappears in the Humboldt Sink east of Reno. This was later to be one of the main routes west for American pioneers headed to California. In his diary at this point Ogden made the cryptic but disturbing notation: “280 Indians camp attacked.”
Ogden’s widest-ranging expedition was his last. Leaving the Columbia River in October 1829, he went south to the Humboldt Sink where he had been the previous year. After he and his men had a clash with the local Native Americans, they moved out of that area to the southwest. Along the route they discovered Carson Lake in western Nevada. As they continued southwest they came to the Sierra Nevadas, the great range that extends through eastern California. Ogden and his men are credited with having been the first to explore the eastern face of the Sierras Nevadas.
Ogden led his party south until they reached the Colorado River. They were very likely the first Westerners to have approached the river from the north. They visited the Mojave tribe near present-day Needles, California, where Jedediah Smith had been in 1827. Ogden then ordered an exhausting march across the desert. At one point they had to eat their dying horses for food and drink the horses’ blood to keep from dying of thirst. In a clash with the Mojave, Ogden and his men killed 26 Mojave warriors.
Leaving the desert, Ogden and his party followed the Colorado south all the way to the Gulf of California; they became the first Westerners to cross the American West from north to south. Heading back north, Ogden led his men through Cajon Pass near San Bernardino, California, into the San Joaquin Valley. Avoiding the Mexican mission stations, he reached northern California, then took his previous trail north from Klamath Lake. As they were crossing the Columbia River near The Dalles, Oregon, one of the boats capsized, drowning nine men; all of Ogden’s records of his monumental last trip were lost.
On his return to Walla Walla in July 1830, Ogden was ordered to head north to what is now British Columbia. He established a Hudson’s Bay Company post at the mouth of the Nass River, near the present-day border of southern Alaska. In 1834, after successfully fending off competition from Americans and Russians, he was made director of all of mainland British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was about this time that Simpson wrote of him that he was “one of the most unprincipled Men in the Indian Country … madness to which he has a predisposition will follow as a matter of course.” However, Ogden’s “unprincipled” behavior seemed to suit the fur-trading frontier because he continued to prosper and the company continued to promote him.
After spending a year’s furlough in England in 1844, Ogden returned with a secret British surveying team that was tracing a route from eastern Canada to the Columbia River as part of the negotiations between Britain and the United States over the Oregon Country. The team’s work was discontinued in 1846, however, when a British-United States settlement extended the 49th parallel boundary all the way to the Pacific, thereby giving Washington and Oregon to the United States.
Ogden and the Hudson’s Bay Company remained in the newly created American territory pending the arrival of an effective American government. In December 1847 Ogden became a hero when he led a team that negotiated the release of American prisoners taken by members of the Cayuse tribe after they had attacked a mission station near Walla Walla. Known as the Whitman Massacre, it had been a brutal attack in which the missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife, and 12 other mission workers were slain by the Cayuse. Ogden spent his last years at Fort Vancouver, Washington. In August 1854, after becoming ill, he traveled to the American settlement of Oregon City to seek medical help. He died there at the age of 64.
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